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Neptune square Pluto

Neptune square Pluto, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Neptune square Pluto is, Cafe Astrology's page on Pluto's own transits notes, a longer-term transit shared by people born in the same and neighboring birth years, its themes of changing belief and soul-searching surfacing again each time the two planets meet at this angle. Within one chart, Cafe Astrology's Neptune-transit reading for the square adds that it can dissolve or change whatever had previously given a person a sense of power or control, a temporarily disorienting shift that the source frames as ultimately moving someone toward a more authentic self-image and sense of empowerment, even while confusing feelings of disconnection pass through along the way. Between two charts, a square from one person's Neptune to another's Pluto sets the two planets a quarter of the circle apart, ninety degrees; the sources consulted for this entry give no separate reading for this specific synastry contact.

The story

A square is ninety degrees, a quarter of the circle, one of the four configurations Ptolemy names; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the opposition, discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary places the square among the hard aspects, crediting it with a strong and usable tension, a turning point where an important decision is needed, often at some cost. Poseidon and Hades are brothers, two of the six children Cronus and Rhea bore according to the Hesiod genealogy the Pluto myth page relates; when the world was divided three ways, the sea fell to Poseidon and the underworld to Hades, so the brothers rule adjoining domains beneath the sky their brother Zeus rules from above. The same page notes that the underworld god was also worshipped as Plouton, a name tied to the Greeks' own sense that mineral wealth found underground belonged to the same chthonic power that governed the earth's dead. Set at this harder angle, the two brothers' adjoining domains work against each other, the sea's dissolving currents meeting an underworld that does not release what it has taken as easily.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Neptune:Pluto:square.